Who Does the Local Church Exist For?
Who is the local church actually for?
Answer: The local church is for Christians. The universal church is made up of every true believer in Christ across the span of time, and those living now gather together on Sunday - the day Jesus rose from the dead. The church is not a building, but a body of believers, and Christ is the head. (Colossians 1:18) The local church is where Christians apply the “body” principles of 1st Corinthians 12 - encouraging, teaching, and building one another up in the knowledge and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ - as he would have us do.
Can I bring an unbelieving friend to church? Yes! Although, you can't rely on your local pastor to do every bit of evangelism. You should be doing that! If a church stays in infancy theology, or neuter the theology in order to be infantile, you will have a large group of starving sheep. (2nd Timothy 4:2)
Attractional Evangelism: We should all have a decent bit of hospitality, good artwork, and quality music in our churches, of course! Being terrible for the glory of God isn't right either. However, MANY churches in America today are built solely on attracting unbelievers in order to convert them. Outreach events are important, but when you remove equipping the saints to preach to the lost instead, you no longer have a local church, but a conference of unbelievers that meets 52 times a year. Preaching to somebody who is saved is an absolutely different message than that who is lost. Many churches today attempt to combine the two, with an edge toward the lost person. To top it off, expensive light shows and secular music are introduced within the service to make the unbeliever feel "more at home" to go along with the soft, funny, and topical message that may or may not truly be from scripture - usually not in these environments.
Either way, all kinds of things are crafted and used to show that Christianity can be an acceptable, non-confrontational, and easy to manage thing that acts almost as a public relations agency for God. Cleaning up the awkward edges of scripture, and presenting a more shallow, and easily digestible version of the gospel - which, we know from scripture is absolutely wrong to do. Even for the good things done in a church like this, the lack of truth being taught to true believers is unacceptable. We are to evangelize, no doubt, but that is not to replace a true gathering of believers. It's two different things.
The true church - we gather, we learn, we encourage and strengthen each other up in the truth of God's Word, we go out, we evangelize, we see some saved, we see some not saved (not up to us!), we bring back what we can, and then repeat. The point is, if it's in the Word, we are to do it. Ignoring things that Christ himself mandated in order to do a version of the gospel we think is better is rejecting Christ's words. It's arrogance. He is God, yet his ways are antiquated?
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"When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power." 1st Corinthians 2:1-5
